Recently in Interviews Category

News including an interview of a well-known person.

  1. Nov09

    Maps, Microsoft Live, and Xbox 360

    I recorded a new podcast tonight with Om Malik covering the big news in the technology industry over the past week. We focused on mapping technologies, mobile phone use, and Microsoft's new online strategy. Om and I hope to continue covering the latest technology news each week. You can subscribe to my enclosures feed to always receive the latest episode of a yet unnamed series.

    The audio file of our discussion lasts for 19 minutes and 39 seconds and is a 9.1 MB download.

    I hope you enjoy. Please leave comment or ask questions directly on this post or contact me.

    Topics discussed:

    1. Flash-powered Yahoo! Maps
    2. Flash on mobile devices
    3. Google Local for mobile powered by J2ME.
    4. Windows Live Local
    5. Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie memos.
    6. Windows Mobile 5
    7. Xbox 360

    Tags: , , , , , ,

  2. Oct16

    Igor Jablokov interview on multimodal search

    Igor Jablokov

    Last Monday night I sat down with Igor Jablokov, an IBM program director working on new methods of multimodal search using open standards, to do a podcast. Multimodal search adds voice commands to a visual display to allow easy access to a long list of commands and contextual information. The technology is currently used in web browsers, mobile phones, and automobile computing systems. I also recorded a presentation by Igor on mobile search at Mobile Monday in April.

    IBM is one of the contributors to the VoiceXML proposed standard. Opera and Motorola are also active contributors. IBM promotes a voice-activated system by combining XHTML, VoiceXML, and XML events. The open software works across many server and client platforms including an Eclipse-based environment for creating voice-enabled content.

    Igor showed off a Samsung phone running Windows Mobile with a prototype of WebSphere multimodal browser. The browser accepts search queries for Yahoo! Local and returns voice-enabled results using Yahoo!'s web service APIs.

    We discussed dynamic grammars, a new development in mobile search that creates acceptable grammars specific to a returned data set. If you are in your car waiting for an urgent e-mail you can ask your car to retrieve all new e-mails with an urgent status and build a grammar based on the senders in the returned data set.

    Igor is tasked with building for the future. Many of the technologies we discussed are not expected to be mainstream until 2008 or 2010. Companies involved in creating these voice-enabled interfaces are already planning for 2015.

    Thanks to Igor for requesting this interview and Text100 for making all the arrangements.

    My audio interview with Igor Jablokov is available in MP3 format. The 28-minute interview is a 12.9 MB download.

    Interview questions

    1. What are some of the biggest obstacles in mobile search today?
    2. What is the XHTML+Voice proposal?
    3. What devices and software support the service today?
    4. What companies are outputting content in this format?
    5. What is IBM's involvement? What other companies are involved?
    6. How is it being used in the car?
    7. How can you accommodate a variety of accents and dialects? A thick Irish accent is supposed to be very difficult to compute.
    8. You brought a new mobile prototype with you today. What's exciting about this advancement?
    9. Tell me about mixed initiatives. What are the current use cases and implementations?
    10. I've used voice software in the past and I felt the need to slow down and annunciate. How has voice recognition improved?
    11. Tell me about JSGF.
    12. How can you create dynamically generated grammars?
    13. Why should I, as a small company, be interested in X+V? Where is the ROI?
    14. What are some ways we can voice-enable our site? What changes do we need to make?
    15. What are some of the largest grammar implementations right now and what sort of hardware is needed to deal with that?
    16. What are some competing standards and implementations? Microsoft Speech?
    17. What are some of the tools I need to get started?
    18. What's coming next? How can I build an application for the next generation of devices and standards?

    Tags: , ,

  3. Nov30

    David Sifry Red Herring interview

    Red Herring published an interview with David Sifry of Technorati. The questions are pretty hard hitting and you get more background on Dave than the typical Technorati mention, like what he remembers about his high school prom. Secret to success? Work your ass off.

    Q. As much as Technorati is popular today, the company’s position in the industry can be considered tenuous. Do you have an exit strategy?

    A. Watch this space.

    Q. Are you profitable?

    A. Not yet.

  4. Nov16

    TechNet summit at Google

    TechNet organized an innovation summit at Google's Mountain View Campus yesterday. The tech elite such as Bill Joy, John Chambers, Eric Schmidt, Paul Otellini, John Doerr, Terry Semel, Carly Fiorna, and more. Michael Beazley of the San Jose Mercury News covered the event.

    Charlie Rose moderated the panels and The Charlie Rose Show will air four episodes this from the event, starting with John Doerr, Bill Joy, and Jeff Taylor tonight.

    Eric Schmidt said "the next killer device is clearly a personal one" and he favors a data iPod holding the world's information.

  5. Nov15

    Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Mercury News interview

    Matt Marshall of the San Jose Mercury News recently visited venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to interview partners John Doerr, Brook Byers and Ray Lane.

    Companies stay in stealth mode longer to discourage clone ventures. Most companies come out of stealth with about 100 employees. People like joining stealth projects, and companies already know who they want for their first 100 employees.

    Brook Byers: Network was a thing of the 1990s. I don't know what it is now.

    John Doerr : It's the blog.

  6. Sep30

    Terry Gross interview on Salon.com

    David Talbot of Salon.com interviewed Terry Gross about her 29 years hosting Fresh Air and her views on the journalistic process. She talks about the difficulties of interviewing Bill O'Reilly, Paul McCartney, and Sean Penn. It is interesting the work that goes into preparing each show such as reading a guest's book and knowing the right way to work yourself into a subject area they might not want to spend too much time addressing. Terry Gross is currently new book, "All I Did Was Ask."

    I think of myself as being a member of the first generation of women who genuinely had a choice about whether to have children or not. And genuinely had a choice for two reasons -- one, the reproductive technology, the Pill or the diaphragm or something, and two, a social climate in which you could make that choice and not be a pariah, someone we should all feel real sorry for, who could never be a part of the mainstream.

  7. Aug02

    The Guardian interviews Nancy Cartwright

    Emma Brockes of The Guardian interviewed Nancy Cartwright, voice of Bart Simpson, about her life as a voice actor. This month Cartwright is performing her play, My Life As a 10-year-old Boy, in Edinburgh.
  8. Jul12

    John Battelle interviews Tony Scott, CTO of GM

    John Battelle interviewed Tony Scott, CTO of GM, in the July 2004 issue of Business 2.0.

    When you go to a gas station now, you can stick the nozzle into the gas tank and it works. But in the early days of the auto industry, there were 2,000 car companies, nothing was standardized, and demand far exceeded supply. In that early era, you could do whatever you wanted. The tech industry has by and large been in that same mode. But that's now changing.

    Today in the typical car, and it doesn't matter whether it's a GM or a Honda (HMC), electronics and software represent roughly about a third of the cost of the car, more than the labor or the steel. They're the single biggest cost in a car today -- and rising.

  9. Jun15

    NPR's On the Media interviews The Wonkette publisher Anna Marie Cox

    Bob Garfield of NPR's On the Media interviewed Anna Marie Cox, editor of Wonkette.

    I think that blogging, as a form of journalism, or as a form of writing doesn't have a lot of rules yet, and it's clear that it doesn't need to try and, and hang, you know, the AP Libel Guide on a blog would be a mistake -- to try and, like, apply your standard journalistic kind of ethical code seems too constrictive for what blogs are. There has to be something that you figure out maybe just on a day to day basis.

  10. Jun14

    Walt Mossberg interviews Steve Jobs

    Today's Wall Street Journal has excerpts from last week's Walt Mossberg interview of Steve Jobs onstage at D: All Things Digital. The article is available to subscribers only, so I will quote at length.

    [W]e've gone from pretty much zero a year ago to about 2% of the legally sold music in the U.S. That's not a giant number, but if you look at it and say it's been accomplished in a year and you look at the trajectory, it's not inconceivable to see it breaking through 5% in the next 24 months as an example, maybe sooner.

    We got enormous pressure to do a PDA and we looked at it and we said, "Wait a minute, 90% of the people that use these things just want to get information out of them, they don't necessarily want to put information into them on a regular basis and cellphones are going to do that." So getting into the PDA market means getting into the cellphone market. And you know, we're not so good at selling to the enterprise where you've got, in the Fortune 500, five hundred orifices called CIOs. In the cellphone market you've got five. And so we figured we're not going to be very good at that.

    The interesting thing about movies though is that movies are in a very different place than music was. When we introduced the iTunes Music Store there were only two ways to listen to music: One was the radio station and the other was you go out and buy the CD.

    Let's look at how many ways are there to watch movies. I can go to the theater and pay my 10 bucks. I can buy my DVD for 20 bucks. I can get Netflix to rent my DVD to me for a buck or two and deliver it to my doorstep. I can go to Blockbuster and rent my DVD. I can watch my DVD on pay-per-view. I can wait a little longer and watch it on cable. I can wait a little longer and watch it on free TV. I can maybe watch it on an airplane. There are a lot of ways to watch movies, some for as cheap as a buck or two.

    And I don't want to watch my favorite movie a thousand times in my life; I want to watch it five times in my life. But I do want to listen to my favorite song a thousand times in my life.

Niall Kennedy Niall Kennedy is a web technologist in San Francisco, California in the United States. I am very interested in the world of... MORE »

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